The moment I stopped trying to make a number one, I made my first number one.
This was 2021. We'd been locked down because of COVID and I was spending every single day in the studio, just releasing the music I'd been making.
I had a few tracks I was convinced would do really well. Every time I finished one I'd be like, yeah, this one's got all the ingredients. One had a really well-known sample. One had a really obvious feeling drop. To me they sounded like the kind of thing that was working at the time.
In my head I'd already decided this could be my first Beatport number one. Then the tracks would come out and they'd do well. I got one that was number five, one that was number four, which is amazing, but every time I'd built up this expectation of what the record was supposed to do.
Then one night me and my girlfriend were in the studio and we made this track. It didn't follow any of the rules I'd made up. We weren't trying to make a hit. We weren't thinking about what sample we could use so people would recognise it. We weren't thinking about what was supposed to work. We just made something that sounded like us, and I fucking loved it.
Honestly my expectation was nothing. It came out and I remember thinking, wow, it's in the top ten. Wow, it's actually doing something. I just wasn't expecting it at all.
A few days later I woke up, checked Beatport, and it was number one. My first ever Beatport number one.
The weirdest part was this was not the record that was supposed to go Beatport number one. Looking back I think that's exactly why it did.
If you're desperate for something to succeed and you start making your decisions based on what you think other people want, you look at what's already working and you start following a formula. That's when you use the sample everyone recognises, or you try to make a version of something that's already been successful.
You don't win by following the crowd.
By the time you can see the formula that you think works, everyone else can see it too, so you're just doing the same thing as everyone else.
That record was different because we weren't trying to make what was working. We were just making something that was true and sounded like us.
The real lesson I took from it: you should care massively about the work, but you shouldn't let your expectation of the result change your work. Sometimes the thing that goes furthest is the thing you made without trying to make it go anywhere.
